A Rosie Future for MSNBC?

Is floundering cable news channel MSNBC changing its name to Marxist-Socialist NBC?

Obviously not, but this week MSNBC announced that it is in discussions about giving a new prime-time show to loony-leftist comic Rosie O’Donnell.

Born in 1996 as the love child of a brief courtship between NBC and Microsoft founder Bill Gates, MSNBC now affirms what everyone has long known – that it is aggressively, regressively moving farther and farther to the ideological left.

Years ago I might have offered a different explanation for this week’s news.

MSNBC’s former Senior Political Analyst, who departed after he threw an infantile fit and called a conservative guest a liar 39 times in the course of a single on-air interview, was longtime hack Democratic operative Lawrence O’Donnell.

Olbermann’s bashing of President Bush, Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly raised MSNBC’s flat-line ratings a few inches above absolute zero. This apparently persuaded NBC executives that MSNBC’s best chance for survival is to carve out a Republican-hating media niche in sync with their own “progressive” ideology.

They aim to attract left-liberals who despise Rupert Murdoch’s fair and balanced Fox News Channel, by far the most popular cable news channels.

Can MSNBC credibly claim even to be a news channel if its prime-time hosts are Olbermann, whose “journalistic” experience comes from being a sportscaster, and Rosie O’Donnell, a 9-11 conspiracy wacko Boston University dropout whose political ideas apparently come entirely from hate-filled left-wing web sites such as Daily Kos?

During months on ABC’s daytime fem-chat show “The View,” O’Donnell attracted eyeballs. But so does a car wreck – and for the same reason. Thousands tuned in just to see what grotesque foolish, bullying, ranting Rosie would shout today.

Rosie, in other words, is watched as those nearby might watch a volcano that is always threatening to erupt. A large woman, she is a mountain rumbling with pent-up energy, much of it born of rage.

A proud lesbian, in her new book Celebrity Detox (The Fame Game) Rosie reportedly reveals that she was molested as a child.

We should sympathize with the inner demons and suffering this caused her, but it does not justify the prejudice, poison and hatred they produced in her.

As I used to warn male listeners to my national radio show, if you are dating a woman who adores Rosie O’Donnell, break up with her immediately. In my opinion, O’Donnell is at least subconsciously a man-hater, and any woman who identifies with Rosie will ultimately bring men who love them to grief.

O’Donnell’s values, radicalism and crazed statements exude sexual warfare and polarization – a polarization that increasingly is the fault line breaking the Democratic “mommy” and Republican “daddy” political parties apart and destroying the deeper unity of America’s family.

In a political cycle in which Sen. Hillary Clinton, D.-N.Y., may emerge as the first major party female standard bearer and be elected first female president, Rosie O’Donnell could become a key cheerleader rallying frustrated, angry, single women to Clinton’s banner.

(Yes, Virginia, even former Clinton political consultant Dick Morris acknowledges that a Clinton candidacy could siphon off perhaps 12 percent of liberal female Republican voters. What is uncertain is how much larger a percentage of blue collar Democratic males will vote Republican if Hillary heads the donkey ticket.)

Whether MSNBC would still have so Rosie a view of O’Donnell on in prime airtime after the 2008 election, when high political passions are spent and flaccid, is very much in doubt.

When the political circus leaves town, MSNBC may feel a need to sweep out the clowns and freaks, take a shower to wash off embarrassing political mud it gleefully slung at Republicans, and set about restoring its tattered reputation that originally was supposed to stand for honest journalism.

But others on MSNBC will be threatened with dismissal long before then. Among the token non-liberals on its air is Tucker Carlson, boyish son of a former Republican-appointed head of the Federal Communications Commission.

Carlson is an anti-Iraq War, pro-drug decriminalization Libertarian who on his afternoon show makes kissy-face with one liberal guest after another. And the show seems stacked ten-to-one with liberal over conservative guests.

If O’Donnell comes aboard, Carlson will likely be thrown overboard to make room for a more reliably pro-Democratic host during the 2008 election campaign year.

Joe Scarborough, a short-termed former Republican congressman from Florida’s panhandle, was moved from the cusp of MSNBC prime time to the wasteland of early morning where nobody is watching.

This happened despite Scarborough writing an in-many-ways-accurate book, Rome Wasn’t Burnt in a Day, about how the Republican Party betrayed its principles. He was exiled despite giving time on his show, and sucking up, to every partisan Democrat and liberal he could find.

On the new farther-left MSNBC Scarborough will either be gone or moved so early into the wee dark hours of the morning that no one will know if he is dead or alive.

Pat Buchanan, the sagacious paleo-conservative anti-Iraq War populist and former staffer for Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, remains an MSNBC fig leaf of balance as well as one of its voices that criticize Republicans.

Deserving a new show of his own, Buchanan is brought on as a foil to be mocked as old-fashioned by the likes of former Tip O’Neill Democratic apparatchik Chris Matthews. Matthews pretends to be a Baby Boomer, but he will have 62 candles on the cake when he celebrates his birthday this December 17.

Happy Birthday, Chris. I pray you enjoy many more before General Electric-owned MSNBC slithers too far left to have even you as a host.